The Escher Cycle: Creating Self-Reinforcing Business Advantage

This book shows how to achieve virtuoso performance in business. Strategic and practical, the author starts by identifying the key minimum activities that make any business successful. He then shows how becoming better than rivals at carrying out those activities is what provides a business with four distinct layers of strategic competitive advantage: The first layer of advantage comes from carrying out the basic activities better than rivals. This is Operations. The second layer comes from balancing and aligning the different parts to optimize the business as a whole. This is Leadership. The third layer comes from fine-tuning the way the activities are carried out to match the particular area of the economy where the business is operating. This is Strategy. And the fourth and ultimate layer of strategic advantage comes when the business connects all its different activities together in a way that generates higher levels of performance at them all. This is the Escher Cycle. The Escher Cycle describes how to create self-reinforcing business advantage, by leveraging the forces of progress that created the successful companies we have today, and which are already forming the successful companies of tomorrow. Virtuoso performance in business, as in any field of human activity, comes from focusing on exactly what is needed no more and no less and then co-ordinating those different activities perfectly. This book explains how to achieve that in business.